Janet Malcolm wrote about two famous American photographers for The New Yorker late in 1974, more than a year after Susan Sontag had published her first two essays on photography in the pages of The New York Review of Books.  Sontag’s interest in photography had been awakened by an exhibition of Diane Arbus’s pictures at the Museum of Modern Art.  Malcolm’s first article, entitled “Two Photographers” when it appeared in November, 1974, was a review of two biographies: Dorothy Norman’s Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer, and Ben Maddow’s Edward Weston: Fifty Years, both published by Aperture in 1973.[1]  The approach to their subject by these two American women—born a year apart, one in New York, the other in Prague—was characteristic of each: Sontag was intellectual and inclusive, wanting to encapsulate and define photography as a field of sociological and aesthetic study, while Malcolm was, as always, a journalist to her fingertips, particularizing and personalizing the subject and concentrating on a few vivid details. 

         Malcolm was colloquial in her descriptions.  Stieglitz, she wrote, was a man of “surpassing pomposity, sententiousness, emotional dullness, and Teutonic humorlessness,” while Weston was an “expansive, barefoot, vegetarian, sun-and-sand-centered, womanizing subject. . .”[2]  Malcolm’s eleven essays on photography, eventually collected and published as a book, Diana & Nikon, in 1980, read as what all but one of them originally were, articles in The New Yorker.  They were fun to read, lacking the ambition to educate the reader on the nature of photography or its broad aesthetic implications, but fully informative about the works under discussion. 

         To be historically accurate, Malcolm had published a substantial article on photography a couple years before Sontag wrote her first essay on the subject.  Titled “About the House,” Malcolm’s article, which ran in The New Yorker on 1 May 1971, opened with this sentence: “There has been a growing (and long overdue) interest in the works of the masters of photography as objects of acquisition, and within the last few years a number of galleries have opened where distinguished prints may be bought for sums that, as art prices go, are fairly modest.”[3]  The article was based in part on Malcolm’s interview with Lee Witkin, the owner of the Witkin Gallery at 237 East 60^th Street.  There customers could purchase, usually for less than $500, prints of photographs taken by Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams, André Kertész, Edward Weston, Margaret Bourke-White, W. Eugene Smith, Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, and Diane Arbus, among others.  Malcolm also interviewed Inge Bondi, the owner of Photography House at 853 Seventh Avenue.  Bondi represented only four photographers: André Kertész, Edward Steichen, Edward Haas, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.  Malcolm closed the article with a visit to Magnum Photos, Inc. at 15 West 46^th Street, which dealt in prints by a number of photojournalists, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Werner Bischof.  About one of these she wrote:

The photographs show people working, resting, talking, people in states of shyness, happiness, rage, people defeated or favored by life, and such is Cartier-Bresson’s grasp of human nature that he recognizes the precise moment out of a hundred possible ones when the observed emotion or activity is at its apex of communicability and universality.  It is at this ‘decisive moment,’ as Cartier-Bresson has called it, that photojournalism leaves the field of sociology and enters the world of art.[4]

         Malcolm may have decided not to include this article in Diana & Nikon because it was merely a piece of reportage, lacking big-picture suggestiveness, but, in retrospect, it takes on at least a little significance as a straw-in-the-wind article, suggestive of a slowly growing receptiveness to photographs on the part of the art-buying public and the openness of that public to even photojournalism as art.  In light of the essays Malcolm and Sontag wrote over the course of the 1970s, this may have been, as Malcolm suggested, the “decisive moment” for photography as an art. 

         The range of photographers Malcolm wrote about ran from Richard Avedon, probably the most famous fashion photographer of his day, at one extreme, to Chauncey Hare, an engineer who worked for twenty years at the Standard Oil refinery in Richmond, California and was in his thirties before he could devote himself to photography as he wanted, at the other.[5]  In the last of her photography essays, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.,” published in 1979, Malcolm quoted an historian, John Kouwenhoven, who had written to correct a misconception that he had found in one of her earlier essays:

When we disagree, we do so because we are looking at different aspects of the same thing.  I realized this when I thought about your final statement: that the camera is no better equipped than the eye to tell us what we want to know about the world.  But is it not also so that the camera is better equipped than the eye to tell us what we do not want to know?  Our eyes are looking for what we want to know; the camera can be aimed in the direction whence we think that information may come.  But left to itself it cannot (as the eye can) limit its attention.  It cannot help showing us what we have no interest in seeing.[6]

Her quoting this letter at length points up one of the things I like best about Malcolm’s writing, not only in Diana & Nikon but in the essays in Forty-One False Starts and in the book-length Reading Chekhov: she never pretended to know more than she did know, and she didn’t write as if she thought she were Immanuel Kant.  She was clearly a journalist, not a philosopher, and that made for a strong contrast with Susan Sontag, who couldn’t stop herself from trying to define her subject for future generations and readers less astute than she.  Pronunciamientos, such as Sontag’s claim that “to photograph someone is a sublimated murder” did not appear in Malcolm’s writing.  She wasn’t reaching for cosmic significance in her essays.  She wanted rather to bring her reader’s attention to aspects of a subject that she found worthy of notice. 

         About August Sander, the German photographer who, during the Weimar republic, recorded an extensive sampling of German society, classifying his subjects by occupation, Malcolm wrote that his “portraits, marked by great beauty, simplicity of form, and veracity of emotional content, are permeated by a sadness that comes across not as a passing feeling experienced by the subject (or as a national characteristic) but as the permanent condition of mankind.  Sander shows us that the human face in repose is tragic.  When we remove the masks that we assume as social beings, we are left with our unalterable loneliness and alienation [Malcolm’s italics].”[7] 

         Malcolm was not the first person to remark the intrinsic sadness of the human face, and I’m not even sure she was the first person to notice it in Sander’s portraits, but her calling attention to it shades and gives depth to our appreciation of the documentary evidence of the German photographer’s pursuit of his nation’s identity.  The Nazi regime that put an end to Sander’s project exerted itself to show the world a different side of German character, such that we don’t expect sadness to be an attribute of Germans.  It might be that human faces look sad in portraits taken by photographers (as opposed to painted portraits and candid photographs) because posing is a tedious business, and it is not natural, except in sleep, for the human face to remain immobile for minutes at a time.  For this very reason adults often look sad or just vacant of emotion in airport lounges and on subways and buses, but this is not necessarily evidence of sadness, or alienation.  In public places people tend to compose their faces as close as possible to blankness as a way of remaining anonymous.  Lack of expression may be interpreted by Malcolm as sadness, but in most cases it is nothing as positive as that.  You have to be meditating on the meagerness of your life’s accomplishments, the paucity of love in your family, or a child’s misfortunes if you wish to show actual sadness in your facial expression and posture.  Blankness is something else.  In any case, human faces are only occasionally legible.  The subjects of August Sander’s and Richard Avedon’s portraits may have been suppressing irritation at the photographer for making them hold an uncomfortable or unnatural position before the camera, or their eyes may have been fatigued by the glaring lights the photographers used.  Alienation was in vogue when existentialism was, in the forty years after World War II, when Janet Malcolm and Susan Sontag were gathering their aesthetics, and it is possible that either or both were projecting their own romantic sensibility onto the photographs they were studying. 

         Writing about Richard Avedon’s sometimes harsh black-and-white pictures of celebrity subjects, photographed with strong strobe lights from below face level to emphasize sagging jowls and wrinkles, Malcolm acknowledged the criticisms he had invited for being mean-spirited, but, she added, a more charitable interpretation could be that these pictures were “a reaction against the glut of idealized youth and beauty that fashion photography forces on its practitioners. . . .  Like the death’s-head at the feast in medieval iconography, these pictures come to tell us that the golden lads and lasses frolicking down the streets of Paris today will be horrible old people tomorrow, that the pursuit of agreeable sensations and the worship of beautiful objects are all vanity.”[8]  She surmised that Avedon intended to disturb and shock viewers with these portraits “in the way that the young Rembrandt meant to disturb and shock with his anti-classical etchings of ‘real women’ (such as Woman Seated on a Mound, with her grotesquely large and flabby stomach and repulsively fat thighs. . .”[9]

         Reading the essays in Diana & Nikon, you are repeatedly struck by the clarity of Malcolm’s vision, a clarity projected into her prose.  Again and again she saw beyond the surface clutter of the medium—a surface that deceptively appeared to represent the objective reality of the visible world—to the always-in-flux forces of fashion and preconception that blow, buffet, and twist the tastes and expectations of photographers and viewers alike.  Her intelligence was relentless, as well as fearless, for over the course of her writing career she tackled wildly dissimilar subjects, bathing them in the glare of her scrutiny much as Avedon did his famous sitters.

         “Photography went modernist not, as has been supposed, when it began to imitate modern abstract art but when it began to study snapshots,” Malcolm wrote in “Two Roads, One Destination.”[10]  This essay dealt with the work of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Emmet Gowin, Henry Wessel, Jr., and others, “action” photographers who “followed people on the street, peered into suburban living rooms, hung around fast-food chains, and—with nothing in mind, with none of the elaborate previsualizations of traditional art photography—repeatedly clicked the shutters of their small cameras.”[11] 

         In the same essay she addressed the color pictures of Harry Callahan, who produced two series of pictures of frame houses in Providence, Rhode Island, where he taught at the School of Design.  The first series, taken in the 1960s, was in black-and-white, the second, taken in the 1970s, was in color.  Of the later series, Malcolm wrote:

 They have taken on an emotional color as well—one that is lacking in the black-and-white versions.  They evoke what we see when we drive through small New England towns.  They exude a Hopper-like sense of the loneliness and emptiness of such places (there are no people here, as in the comparable Hoppers), of the small-town willingness to accept the wistfulness and unfulfillment that underlie provincial peace and security.[12] 

If we overlook the fact that Providence is not a small town, we can appreciate the comparison of Harry Callahan’s vision of built domesticity to Edward Hopper’s, whose depictions of New England houses predated Callahan’s by half a century. 

         Malcolm also explored photography’s fraught relations with modernism.  “The modernist preoccupation with the form rather than with the content of art is photography’s native, inherent preoccupation,” she wrote.[13]  Depending on the year or decade you designate as the birthdate of modernism, it coincides closely—give or take a decade or two—to the beginning of photography.  Both arose in France in the middle of the nineteenth century.  The Gazette de France announced Daguerre’s success in fixing light-engendered images on polished metal on 6 January 1839.[14]  Four years earlier Théophile Gautier, then all of twenty-three years old, published Mademoiselle de Maupin with a preface in which he set down the principle that, simplified, became known as “art for art’s sake.”[15]  Not every intellectual historian accepts Mademoiselle de Maupin as the first clearly modernist work of literature; the publication in 1857, eighteen years after the announcement of Daguerre’s invention, of both Madame Bovary and Les Fleur du mal should certainly count as decisive in determining the latest date for modernism’s birth.[16]

         “When [John] Szarkowski observed that ‘whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography,’ he was stating the special metaphoric connection of photography to modernism,” Malcolm continued, drawing a link between Alfred Stieglitz and his Photo-Secession aesthetic and that of Picasso, Brancusi, Rodin, and O’Keeffe.[17]  She was ahead of her time is asserting photography’s unequivocal connection to modernism in 1978, the year this essay was published; that connection would not be widely conceded by art historians until later in the century. 

         If there was a hero behind the scenes in Diana & Nikon, it was John Szarkowski, the director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991 and the person who did more than anybody else to broaden the public’s view of art photography.[18]  His exhibitions at MoMA were often the donnée behind Malcolm’s essays on photography in The New Yorker.  His book, The Photographer’s Eye, was cited in her bibliography, and Malcolm acknowledged him in her preface, remarking that he had “quietly transformed photography from a loose end to a force in contemporary art, and has created a climate in which serious critical writing about photography is possible.”[19] 

         Although conscientious in her reportage, Janet Malcolm revealed in places a lurking class bias that could sneak up on the reader.  After describing the front door of a house photographed by one of her favorite artists, William Eggleston, she added:

One knows perfectly well what lies behind the door: the “traditional” furniture of wood-grained plastic, the little ornate bon-bon dishes with scalloped edges, the candleholders trimmed with more, probably “autumnal,” plastic flowers, the pinch-pleated draperies of shimmering acrylic, the utter absence of any mess or sign of life, or even any trace of the puzzled people who live there, caught between the church-picnic past and the post-Dachau present.[20] 

That final thrust, the mention of Dachau, came out of nowhere and had not the least relevance.  It expressed only Malcolm’s utter contempt for the people—or rather, the class of people—who occupied the house, and it hit a jarring note.  Her condescension to the occupants of the house was palpable, not only in the allusion to Dachau but in the scare quotes around traditional and autumnal.  Plastic furniture cannot be anything but faux traditional, and one surmises that Malcolm would not have been caught dead with anything faux in her home.  And why did she think the home’s occupants were puzzled?  Because they couldn’t tell the difference between authentic domestic beauty and kitsch?  In 1977, when Malcolm wrote this essay, everybody’s present was post-Dachau and, worse, post-Auschwitz.  What did that have to do with décor? 

         A note of churlishness evinced itself more than forty years later when she reviewed Benjamin Moser’s biography of Susan Sontag.  Having noted that researching a life can strain a biographer’s sympathy for the subject, she nevertheless surmised that: “Moser’s exasperation with Sontag is fueled by something that lies outside the problematic of biographical writing.  Midway through the biography, he drops the mask of neutral observer and reveals himself to be—you could almost say comes out as—an intellectual adversary of his subject.”[21]  While it is true that several other reviewers faulted Moser for dwelling on Sontag’s selfishness, hypocrisy, and negligent parenting, it is also patently the case that he gave equal or greater emphasis to her brilliance as an essayist, her successes in attracting a series of remarkably talented lovers, her loyalty to at least some of her friends, her courage in going to Sarajevo when it was under siege by Serb forces in the 1990s, and her stoicism in fighting death by cancer when doing so entailed unspeakable suffering.  Moser’s portrait of Sontag was not a hagiography, but neither was it an assassination in print, though some of Sontag’s many admirers may think it so.  Indeed, Sontag came off in Moser’s book as a woman who largely overcame handicaps that would have overwhelmed a person less resolute or gifted, and one who acknowledged her weaknesses, at least to herself.  She was an intellectual woman before most Americans were ready to accept women who were both indigenous and intellectual.

         A little later in the review, Malcolm wrote: “. . .Moser can barely contain his rage at Sontag for not coming out during the AIDS crisis.”[22]  The rage, though, is Malcolm’s, not Moser’s.  Malcolm asserts that Moser could not forgive Sontag for her refusal to identify herself as gay during the AIDS crisis, but this is speculation on her part and in no way substantiated by what Moser wrote.[23]  One can only guess at what it was in Moser’s biography that elicited such an outpouring of enmity from a woman otherwise known for her lightness of touch and sympathy, but possibly it was that he had dared to show unsavory features in a life that had become, even while Sontag was alive, a feminist monument, much as, in the final years of his life, any criticism of John McCain was rejected as scurrilous.  Americans are devout worshippers of certain kinds of celebrity. 

         “Everything is being tried, but nothing seems to dispel the malaise that hangs over contemporary photography or the uneasiness, lack of confidence, alienation, and dislocation that afflict the contemporary photographer,” Malcolm wrote in 1976.[24]   Three years earlier, comparing the invention of photography to that of printing, Sontag had written: “A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies.  But print seems a less treacherous form of leeching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present.”[25]

         Sontag was probably correct to liken the disruptive nature of photography to that of printing, for both changed the way people interpreted the world.  A year later, in “The Heroism of Vision,” Sontag expanded on this theme:

Protected middle-class inhabitants of the more affluent corners of the world—those regions where most photographs are taken and consumed—learn about the world’s horrors mainly through the camera: photographs can and do distress.  But the aestheticizing tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralizing it.  Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.[26] 

Do photographs “miniaturize experience” any more than television or print journalism?  Mass communications have made people aware of distant wars, famines, and atrocities, but they have carried the news of horrific events in a relentless stream of information that also includes glimpses into the personal lives of pop and entertainment stars, political news out of Washington, weather reports, and sports highlights, all of which combine to project a miniaturizing context for those events.  Sontag wrote as if photographers were peculiarly endowed with the power to aestheticize the world, but if anything photography is feebler in this capacity than television, which thrillingly beautifies a raging wildfire as it gloriously consumes chaparral, trees, and hillside homes.  The distancing effect of media is nothing new, and it is not confined to or concentrated in photography.

         Malcolm compared the photograph to the written word when she considered Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book written by James Agee and illustrated with the photographs of Walker Evans in 1939: “The disparity between the testimony of [Evans’s] photographs and that of Agee’s text comes not out of a disagreement between the two witnesses about what they saw but out of photography’s inadequacy as a describer of how things are.  The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.”[27]  These would be fighting words for most professional and serious amateur photographers, as well as for museum curators of photography, but Malcolm did not write them to be tendentious.  Unlike these others, she did not agree to hold photography to the same aesthetic standards as painting and sculpture.  She saw it as an embattled form of expression, rather as motion pictures had been before James Agee, Andrew Sarris, and Pauline Kael, among others, came along to claim it as high art. 

         In 1976 Malcolm wrote: 

With the exception of the late Diane Arbus, no photographer has emerged during the last forty years who can be discussed in the same breath as Stieglitz, Weston, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, and Kertész.  It may be that the golden age created by these and a few other masters is a single, aberrant episode in a medium whose true purposes are fulfilled not by artists struggling against its mechanical grain but by artisans and amateurs letting it call the shots.[28]

Now Malcolm does sound tendentious; it is not difficult to think of a number of photographers who began showing their photographs after 1936 and who arguably could rank with Stieglitz, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, and Kertész.  Robert Frank is an obvious choice; Annie Leibovitz is another, though somewhat less obvious; and there are half a dozen photojournalists whose work is no less distinguished, such as Larry Burrows (1926-1971), an Englishman and staff photographer for Life whose pictures acquainted the world with the anguish and futility of the Vietnam War. 

         The suggestion that a photojournalist like Larry Burrows should  be considered in the same aesthetic company as Stieglitz et alia points up one of the unavoidable difficulties raised by any discussion of photography as an art: unlike painting and sculpture, photography, even at its highest levels of sophistication, has documentary and scientific applications that make it invaluable as a tool of journalism, the national defense, astronomy, medicine, oceanography, and countless other worldly enterprises.  Drawings and paintings have also been used as documentation, but usually only when other, more unfailingly accurate and timely, documents are unavailable, such as in the entire history of mankind before 1839.  If you want to know what Samuel Johnson looked like, you have to rely on painters such as Joshua Reynolds and the verbal descriptions of people who knew him, such as James Boswell.  Tendentiousness enters the conversation as soon as we began to compare photographers whose aims were fundamentally different, as when comparing the pictures taken in Vietnam by Larry Burrows and those taken at about the same time by Diane Arbus. 

         Photography, being a comparatively new form of expression, tends to exalt its earliest practitioners, such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, known to the world as Nadar, much as motion pictures will forever pay homage to D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein.  Malcolm’s judgment that photographers who practiced their art before 1936 were superior to all those who practiced it thereafter reflects this bias in favor of the pioneer at the expense of the professional working with tools developed by the pioneer.  With cinema, though, we do not penalize Louis Malle or Steven Spielberg for having made movies after Griffith and Eisenstein were dead.  Photography did not go into a decline during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term, but it did develop in unexpected ways, and as Malcolm seemed to predict in 1971, photojournalism succeeded, during the decades that followed, in gaining recognition as, if not a fine art, a craft deserving as much respect as documentary film. 

[1] Janet Malcolm, “Two Photographers,” The New Yorker, 18 Nov. 1974, https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1974-11-18/flipbook/226/

[2] Janet Malcolm, Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography. Boston: David R. Godine, [1980], 1,10.

[3] Janet Malcolm, “About the House,” The New Yorker, 1 May 1971 https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1971-05-01/flipbook/118/

[4] Malcolm, “About the House,” https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1971-05-01/flipbook/118/

[5] Janet Malcolm, Diana & Nikon, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.,” 152-153.

[6] Janet Malcolm, Diana & Nikon, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.,” 155.

[7] Janet Malcolm, “Men without Props,” Diana & Nikon, 50-51.

[8] Janet Malcolm, “Men Without Props,” Diana & Nikon, 46-47.

[9] Janet Malcolm, “Men Without Props,” Diana & Nikon, 47.

[10] Janet Malcolm, “Two Roads, One Destination,” Diana & Nikon, 113.

[11] Janet Malcolm, “Two Roads, One Destination,” Diana & Nikon, 116.

[12] Janet Malcolm, “Two Roads, One Destination,” Diana & Nikon, 127-128.

[13] Janet Malcolm, “Two Roads, One Destination,” Diana & Nikon, 129.

[14] Beaumont Newhall. The History of Photography. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982, 18.

[15] Peter Gay. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008, 51.

[16] Peter Gay. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008, 38.

[17] Janet Malcolm. “Two Roads, One Destination.” Diana & Nikon, 129.

[18] John Szarkowski: A Life in Photography, https://www.amazon.com/John-Szarkowski-Life-Photography/dp/B07VKQ8FCP

[19] Janet Malcolm, “Preface,” Diana & Nikon, ix.

[20] Janet Malcolm, “Color,” Diana & Nikon, p. 91.

[21] Janet Malcolm, “Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography,” The New Yorker, 16 Sept. 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/23/susan-sontag-and-the-unholy-practice-of-biography

[22] Janet Malcolm, “Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography,” The New Yorker, 16 Sept. 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/23/susan-sontag-and-the-unholy-practice-of-biography

[23] Janet Malcolm, “Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography,” The New Yorker, 16 Sept. 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/23/susan-sontag-and-the-unholy-practice-of-biography

[24] Janet Malcolm, “Diana and Nikon,” Diana & Nikon, 73.

[25] Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” Essays of the 1960s & 70s. New York: Library of America, 2013, 529-530.

[26] Susan Sontag, “The Heroism of Vision,” Essays of the 1960s and 70s, 605.

[27] Janet Malcolm, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.,” Diana & Nikon, 149.

[28] Janet Malcolm, “Diana and Nikon,” in Diana & Nikon, p. 73.